Japan Times: Cesium levels spiking with unusually high amount of fallout in Okutama, Tokyo up to 300,000 Bq/m² — Home to World’s largest drinking water reservoir of its kind, built to supply Tokyo

An aerial radiation survey of the capital and Kanagawa Prefecture has revealed the northwest tip of Tokyo was tainted by an unusually high amount of fallout [... in] the mountainous Okutama region on Tokyo’s western fringe. Radiation readings in the area were the highest of the two prefectures at 100,000 to 300,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per square meter.

The hourly radiation readings in the area hovered between 0.2 and 0.5 microsievert, but a few spots had higher levels between 0.5 and 1.0 microsieverts, science official Hirotaka Oku said. [...]

91 comments to Japan Times: Cesium levels spiking with unusually high amount of fallout in Okutama, Tokyo up to 300,000 Bq/m² — Home to World’s largest drinking water reservoir of its kind, built to supply Tokyo

The doctor says to beware at the sushi bar… Hold the wasabi!
From Japan Times:
[highly radiated region] Okutama is known for its production of wasabi. So we will conduct tests on wasabi from Okutama next week,” Tomonaga said.He said Okutama is the biggest producer of wasabi in Tokyo. In 2009, 23 out of the 26 tons of wasabi production in Tokyo was from Okutama, he said.
I’m a doctor not a miracle worker. Spock get us out of here!

This will become or is the synopsis of most of the Northern Half of Japan and it’s drinking water reservoir’s !
I suspect that Northern area lakes are even more contaminated and have been since March !

Under water springs water flow is North to South and all water above ground where rain’s, snow’s and wind’s will blow/wash contaminates to lower area’s and underground water flows, many flowing south !
As in Chernobyl and will be in Japan the contaminates in time will be washed off natural/ upper areas, tree’s, mountain’s, rock’s, field’s/farmland’s or man made/ building’s, street’s, bridge’s, factory’s, all to lower levels finally most ending up in lower levels of all areas were water often also accumulates above and below ground !

heres a thought… i am going to buy ten of these dvds…i will give them to my closest friends and ask them to pass it on to five or ten people…gotta funny feeling this wont be big on the msm…hope im wrong! but the production and the message is powerful and simple..well done mikio kaku, i feel i speak for all on enenews when i say thank you for breaking the mold! thank you for supporting this documentary…and also to all those wonderful people, who we praise regularly here , more or less thank you too! your voice is louder than ours…admin can i retire now? bleedin john pilgar, my favorite researcher ….cor blimey whoopie this should fly….excellent post…. made my night…where to get dvds ?………gnight

I’m a doctor not a nuclear engineer, but we recently had an early rain here in LA and now I’m thinking, hey we get our water from the high sierras (apologies to the Owens Valley) and since the sierras collect snow from pacific storms, aren’t we facing the same problem as the late great city of Tokyo? Just sayin’.
Spock get us out of here.

Yes, snow contains 5 times as much radioactive material than rain (per unit water). The drinking water has been contaminated so far with snowmelt from snow that fell from mid-March to June. The new snowpack will contain an entire season’s worth of contaminated snow. This will start melting next spring and enter the water supply.

“The new study, which appears in the Royal Meteorological Society journal Weather, included data from winter 2006, showing that snow fell around the power station when the rest of the county stayed foggy, but dry.

Dr Wood said: “What normally happens with freezing fog is a process called ‘super-cooling’, where even though it is below freezing temperature, it remains liquid.

“To cause snow, you need some sort of particle in the air.

“Around power stations, it seems pretty probable that industrial effluent acts as that catalyst.”

i suspect thats why they are really trying to get the tents erected and UNdo the damage that particulate isotopes could do….some boy scouts there and of course mr yakuza the scout master, who is IAEA and WHO approved, will make them naughty boy scouts UNderstand the safeness of isotopes……for little money!

It’s a double whammy. The effluents serve as nuclei for snowflakes… and then the flakes fall to the ground like little feather dusters, trillions of them, scavenging the atmosphere for more little particles.

“According to the science ministry, radioactive materials spewed from the stricken plant were carried away by the wind and landed on the ground mostly via rain, contaminating areas far beyond the Tohoku region.”

Tokyo inhabitants will begin to get nervous. The very wealthy have left or have bought water filtering systems for drinking and washing. Imported food is a given for those who can afford it, but even that food picks up poison in transit. HEPA air filters will help. But moving outside… Unless they wear a full hazmat suut with a respirator, then even the wealthy will fall prey to contamination from the air.

So how will this great city react to an invisible menace? If we look at history the citizens in Tokyo have seen great menaces from the skh before. On March 9-10, 1945 three hundred American B-29 bombers dropped firebombs in sneak low altitude attacks. 100,000 Japanese died and 16 square miles of the city was incinerated. The passage of 66 years has not eased the minds of survivors nor their knowledge that Americans were the enemy. In World War II the issue of war crimes against civilians was dismissed much it has been dismissed in later conflicts like Vietnam and the Middle East. Agent Orange and B-52 bombing campaigns killed millions in Vietnam, but in that conflict the outcome was different.

So we know the spirit of Japanese is resilient. The question is how will they deal with an invisible and growing enemy? The contamination of land and water will increase exponentially with winter snow and the spring melt from trees laden with poison. Water supplies are going to worsen drastically in the spring. By this time next year the horrors of radiation sickness will begin to take a massive toll in Tokyo and in all of Japan. No place is safe, no place to hide in Japan.

Voices crying in the wilderness. Barack Hussein Obama will never allow the media blackout to be lifted. He is more interested in re-election than a crumbling radioactive Japan, which would hinder his campaign. Heaps of shame Mr. Dictator. Rad contaminated Tokyo drinking water should be on every newspapers front page. Tired of it all…

Admin and all, this is my first post to Enenews, but I found this site shortly after the disaster, which I’ve been following since March 11th from Vietnam.

I would like to thank everybody on this site for their thoughtful contributions, pay my respects to those who have taken on the task of monitoring radiation themselves (really, thank you, thank you for replacing our governments in this regard).

I used to, sadly, be pro-nuclear, but given the evidence, this seems a ridiculous position to continue.

I found Enenews when the Guardian website (UK) suddenly stopped running their Fukushima Live Blog. Reading the comments there, I realised several other people were stunned that they decided to do this. Thus I was led to the realisation that pure absence of news appears to be one of the most successful forms of propaganda.

Like many posters here, I have tried to talk to my friends and family about this, but have been utterly ignored, with literally a couple of exceptions.

I do not understand the majority of humans on this planet, and therefore have to say I understand the appearance of Spock on this website.

At the beginning of this disaster I read some blogs from America saying “JUST NUKE THE MO’F*’ and I thought it was, of course, a little ignorant.

But on the other hand, is there any other solution to this disaster? Without the absolute incineration and fission of the radioactive substances, is there any other viable solution other than a slow/fast leaching of poisons into our environment?

If there are any physicists out there who could make some environmental cost/benefit analysis of this, it would be interesting. The financial and human cost to Japan is already great, so perhaps radical solutions are needed. Perhaps if we could have a realistic assessment of the radiation costs of either (a) doing nothing or (b) using as nuclear bomb to destroy it, it would help us to eliminate this suggestion, if it is actually ridiculous.

A big Welcome, nowisthetime,
Happy to see you here, You have a beautiful land there, can you divulge where at in Vietnam, reason I ask is to see if I have been there ! I saw and relayed articles of the freezing winter there this year and the enormous lose of life, also Water buffalo’s, very sad !
On this list… http://members.beforeitsnews.com/stories/by/0000000000004882

“is there any other solution to this disaster? Without the absolute incineration and fission of the radioactive substances, is there any other viable solution other than a slow/fast leaching of poisons into our environment? [ie nuclear bombing of Fortune Island).

SP: I have advocated the idea many times. The idea of bombing with a neutron bomb in a shaped underground charge to throw the island into the deeper waterz offshore. I am willing to bet the military nuclear folks have a plan to do it if given the command. When I get on my laptop later I will examine the pros and cons of such a plan.

Thanks for your reply SP. Perhaps a new forum could be opened discussing realistic solutions to this problem, of which I now am beginning to believe a nuclear fission event may be one? It may attract a few more physicists and ecologists to the site. Once again, thank you for all your forum posts, I’ve been reading it all, and I’m sure there are many other silent readers out there. Hello to them too (hi y’all!), they also deserve respect for their concern.

mbing the plant would be, as far as I see it, that the rapid fission process would destroy the most dangerous isotopes rapidly (ie, plutonium) and NOT allow those products top gradually leach into the sea. If a nuclear explosion simply moved it into a different area, I would not support that. If it consumed a greater number of radioactive isotopes in a shorter time than would otherwise be projected into the environment, I would.

It’s the most extreme solution there is, but it would be a fitting end to nuclear power, if it’s biggest failure was both nuked out of existence for the safety of humanity, and thus all other nuclear power plants closed.

Hi nowisthetime and welcome (waves). I remember reading that one of the very early fission bombs (Fat Man maybe?) had a nuclear ‘core’ about the size of a grapefruit, weighing in at several kilograms. On detonation, only 7 grams (from memory) of mass was actually lost (presumably this figure was derived from theoretical calculation) the rest just got spread around the show. Presumably most of it was still ‘dirty’, judging from the radioactivity evident at the test sites.

Anyway, this suggests that any nuclear material not ‘designed in’ to the bomb will almost certainly just get spread around, because most of the stuff that makes up the critical mass in the weapon just gets spread around. I think SP has an idea to kind of bury the site with a subterrainian explosion, but that’s another ball game. Tough stuff to get rid of, which is just one reason that so many of us are a little annoyed with the nuke people.

Isn’t it like a a hypocritical dilemma we are all virtually in together? Many of us enjoy visiting this forum because the powers of Nuclear Plants. To have what we want (no nuclear) we’d have to be willing to forgo what we want/need I think. We cant have it both ways, maybe. Of course, there has to be alternate power sources. Its interesting how Japan acknowledges how well they actually have moved forward WITHOUT nuclear plant restarts. Maybe a paradigm shift for them?

Speak for yourself Anthony No nuke plants here (Oz) apart from a small medical job in Sydney, and some of us aren’t happy about that either – just glad it’s a thousand miles away.

Once people catch on that power is a valuable commodity they learn not to waste it. You guys (in the USA) have become accustomed to using power without giving it a thought. My own home consumes about 25% (electricity) of the average US home, last time I checked. If I decide to go solar we could produce all our own power (equivalent) and maybe shift some back into the grid. It’s not a hard habit to break if you are willing to make the changes, although the solutions may differ from one area to the next.

Thanks xdrfox, nice to actually say something to you personally, I’ve been reading your posts regularly (along with everybody else on here that you can name!).

I’m in Hanoi. Nothing really mentioned here about the radiation, although some are aware. Since the beginning of the crisis I’ve been montoring reports, and trying to find meteorological projections. From what I have seen so far, it seems that Vietnam is relatively safe in terms of fallout.

There are a couple of things I’m worried about;

1. Food prices in Vietnam will rise as a consequence of irradiated food in Japan. Not sure what effect that will have.

2. Vietnam plans to build a nuclear reactor.

I have a very amusing quote from the Vietnamese Minister for Energy:

Extract from the Vietnam Economic news, No.50/2009 (www.ven.vn)

Ta Van Huong, Director of the Energy Department of the Ministry of Industry and Trade:

“In fact, those who voted for the project [to build Vietnam's first nuclear reactor] doubt the safety of nuclear power plants. But safety or lack of safety is not really the issue. The concern now is will those who are directly involved in implementing this project be able to remove these doubts. Our goal is to remove those doubts. To do this, we need to execute an intense propaganda campaign to make everybody think that the only way Vietnam can have sustainable economic growth is with the use of nuclear energy produced by nuclear power plants. We will push the idea that nuclear power will boost the growth of industries such as mechanical engineering, transportation and health care and provide all consumer needs.

We will have information about nuclear power that we will provide to anyone who wants it. And we hope that this propaganda campaign will help people understand what nuclear power is and take away their worries about the danger of nuclear power plants.

The nuclear power industry in many countries has established propaganda centres to disseminate information about nuclear power. These centres put on display sample objects and models to help people learn about nuclear power. After obtaining this basic knowledge of nuclear power, people come to understand that it is absolutely possible to have nuclear power plants which are under control and totally safe. In the time to come, steps will be taken to ensure that Vietnamese people will have this experience.”

cant wait for the follow up nowisthetime! i have friends from vietnam and will greatly appreciate any news from that part of the world…especially geiger readings as the winds from japan are able to make there way down to vietnam, korea etc… i have not been able to find out about these southerly winds that run down the coast of china…how long do they flow south…when does the wind change and for how long? i know that they have recently been blowing down there!… oh and pleased to meet you, your posts are interesting!

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano told journalists that nuclear energy is not solely for advanced countries but also developing countries like Vietnam, which can implement and apply nuclear energy towards its economic development.

Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh asked Amano to have the IAEA continue to help Vietnam, especially in the implementation of the nuclear power program to assist the country’s socio-economic development. Minh applauded the IAEA’s role and contribution to international efforts in promoting the use of atomic energy for peace while helping to increase atomic safety and security and added that, apart from supporting and joining international efforts against the spread of nuclear weapons, Viet Nam attached great importance to the legitimate rights of nations in using atomic energy for peaceful purposes, The Vietnam Plus news agency reported.

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that by 2030 the number of nuclear plants will increase by 350 because many countries want a stable and secure source of energy, supplementing the world’s current 432 nuclear power plants. Amano said, “Every country wants energy security because it is an essential need. This is why many nations, including those in ASEAN, want to keep nuclear power as an option.”

“The most detailed account was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 3. Based on the comments of a top US official, the article explained that Washington was in “advanced negotiations” with Hanoi over an agreement to share nuclear fuel and technology with Vietnam. Significantly, the deal would allow Vietnam to enrich its own uranium to produce fuel for its power reactors, subject to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”

geigers can be bought through ebay, but mark has had some delay purchasing direct from russia…other commenters here purchased through an american or french intermediatory gieger company and got i got my soeks digital within the month!! good luck!
peace

I am in SAIGON- But I have absolutely NO news zip nada about radiation here! The nuke plant idea for Vietnam will probably be scrapped because amid all the influence peddling here the people at their core surely
see the destruction of Japan- Its unavoidable

Nice to meet you to here, I was always in the South Vietnam, look forward to going back soon, will go into North this time also !
Yes food will be a major concern, as it is in many countries already and with weathern patterns as they have been, RAIN’S either way too much or little or non at all !
Since Vietnam exports over 5.5 million tonnes of rice in Sept. this year !http://www.saigonmoney.com/2011/09/20/vietnam-exports-over-5-5-million-tonnes-of-rice/
And that was just Sept. along with other shipments I saw in the news prior months, I think your country is in hood shape for rice !
Also saw a report:
Asian nations to stockpile rice for emergencies
Japan, China, South Korea, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are expected to agree that each country will stockpile rice to deal with possible serious food shortages after …http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/07_04.html

Shows that they are aware of bad weather such as Vietnam, China and Thailand has just experienced with flooding from storms. Many lives lost, very sad, but an article I read this week of a Vietnamese woman after flooding, begging gov. for food for her family, very sad !

Yes the nuclear industry dose set the stage for wonderful prosperity with nuclear power to produce a better economy and jobs, and there are them that stand to make lots of money continuously and they are usually the governments people that OK the power to prevail !
Setting the stage may be here for jobs from Japan that they may be no longer able to do/make !

Vietnam is planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo to help Japanese firms invest in the country.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment is preparing to set up an investment center in cooperation with a Japanese private organization, Vietnam Economic …http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/09_15.html

This may be a warning, as to they had now lost much to the disaster and an article as to where/how to dispose, comes to mind as to the smaller things…
50 percent of medical waste incinerators left idle
Vietnam Bridge – More than a half of the medical waste incinerators existing in Vietnam have been left unused, because their owners do not have money to pay for fuel and maintenance, and fix problems. Especially, they still do not know how to treat the toxic heavy metals in the ashes. … http://english.vietnamnet.vn/en/environment/13789/50-percent-of-medical-waste-incinerators-left-idle.html

They describe nuclear plants as ‘stable and secure’ in the face of all the evidence? Oh, right…they aren’t reporting the evidence.
I believe that a poster incorporating the nose-bleeding children and mutant flowers would be useful in a political context.
I also hope that people can stop these plants from being built. Vietnam can use solar power, there is no need for a nuclear plant!

Again, I was amused by this. I was brainstorming with a friend about what the rich would do due to the disaster, and we cam up with the idea that buying staple foods would be a key market. I went online to look at it, and rice has shot up. Japan entered rice into the futures market, and then suspended it due to alarmingly high trading.

“Japan started trading rice futures Monday but suspended the market after the price of the staple grain soared on fears that radioactive contamination from the Fukushima disaster will restrict supply.”

“If profit comes for a time and later lose all, where is the profit ? “.

In the mind of a psychopath, personal gain is everything. The profit is in the mind of the person who thinks they exploited the system and won. In that case, I don not believe the protect the world”future generations” argument will work; for them, there is only now and profit.

“The nuclear power industry in many countries has established propaganda centres to disseminate information about nuclear power”

Love it…that is just classic…some countries have a different interpretation of the word “propaganda” and to see this Vietnamese government message gives a whole new light to the world-wide coverup campaign by the nuclear industry. We can call it a semi-secret world government because of the fascist life and death powers they hold over the people of planet earth.

Sickputer, just a kindly note.. I don’t think it helps to refer to it as fascist, despite that being its nature. It comes with too many connotations, and people tend to think of Nazis. Of course, it is true, but it probably helps to describe it as “supra-government industrialism”, or something like that, in order to help people escape their previously held notions of Fascism being a German/Italian thing.

A bit of a mouthful, but I follow Edward Bernaise’s thinking; he renamed propaganda “public relations”. See the excellent Adam Curtis documentary, “Century of the Self”. I think it’s on Youtube. Anybody else got an idea of what to describe our current global system as, in a snappier way? If it connotates “evil” that would be a bonus point. Don’t want to let the hypothetical grandkids get confused.

Yes..I pondered briefly on that word choice…but stuck it in because of so much perceived grief from the world’s cabal of the military industrial complex (Eisenhower’s words for the last three).

Wikipedia has a nifty definition of fascist:

“it is anti-anarchist, anti-communist, anti-conservative, anti-democratic, anti-individualist, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary, anti-bourgeois and anti-proletarian.It entails a distinctive type of anti-capitalism and is typically, with a few exceptions, anti-clerical. It rejects egalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism in favour of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit and will.”

I’m a doctor, not a brigadier general, but I am curious as to the exact location of the tens of thousands of Ameican service men and women and their families that are stationed in the irradiated country of Japan. Also where is the USS Ronald Reagan and its crew? There has been no mention as to the exact status of this Super-carrier and its people since it steamed (ironically under nuclear power) through a highly radioactive Fuke cloud back in late March.
Today is also my first day posting here after reading faithfully since March. This site and its community have been a light in a yellow journalistic world of darkness.
McCoy out.

I talked to a man at the post office a few months back who’s daughter was on the Reagan at that time, other then saying how they had to wash/scrub the vessel down he had no other information from her !

Hi Dr.McCoy, welcome aboard I saw Spogh (Vulcan pronunciation) wandering around here awhile ago with a Geiger counter, taking readings of the crew and muttering something about barbarian medical practises. I have no idea what he was talking about though.

Well,glad to meet you Dr. McCoy. Two first time posters in a row. I think that it would help if everybody who is watching this now, who knows something, got on it now. It’s a sad situation, and let’s face it, those that know, know it effects us all.

Thanks for your input, and I would also be interested in knowing what has happened to that good ol’ ship. I’m sure their just going through routine tests though. Isn’t that always the case.

Thank you nowisthetime. A big welcome to you too.
I’ve spoken about Fuke since the truth as to the depth of this tragedy became obvious in the first days. Only a few of my friends and acquaintances expressed interest in hearing it. It was a downer. The rest have preferred an ignorance is bliss position. In their defense, those who don’t want to hear it are mostly parents of young children. It’s sure a scary future for them.. Me, I’ve lived a full life so I’m not scared of the truth.
As for the ship, xdrfox has posted some info above but I haven’t checked it out yet.
Ahead warp 6.

By the way, Dr McCoy, I am not a conspiracy theorist either. This is a dangerous, cancerous situation. If ANYBODY could please give me evidence it’s not, I would be extremely grateful.

Unfortunately, right now, citizens must search for truth. I have never realised it as much as now. But if only some government mouth-piece could release some convincing information that everything’s OK, I would be so delighted.

In the mean time I watch normal, non-governmental people buying radiation metres, and I trust them more, because they get close to the ground, and not 30 metres in the air from a high-rise building. It’s absolutely insane.

I never, ever wanted to have to protest. That only happens when insane things happen. This is that situation. I’m scared of the people in power now; I’ve seen how much power they have to control the media. And it’s not our governments, it’s power companies.

But when one of the most influential people in the world is a Mexican drug baron, why should that surprise us?

We need serious change, or actually, seriously, we are going to kill ourselves. Nano-particles of plutonium anyone? Anybody care to test for it? If the Japanese government doesn’t want to, and the American government thinks it’s unnecessary, surely we’re safe , right?

Does anybody think this could be joined to the 99% movement? Because I think the 1% probably have access to un-irradiated food and better water filtration.

Vietnam is planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo to help Japanese firms invest in the country.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment is preparing to set up an investment center in cooperation with a Japanese private organization, Vietnam Economic Research Institute.

The plan is expected to be officially announced when Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visits Tokyo later this month.

The Japanese research institute says the liaison office will open by the end of this year.

It says the center will provide information on Vietnam’s industrial complexes and related laws for Japanese companies which are considering investing in the country or constructing plants there. Specialized staff will also offer consultation services.

The Vietnamese government is seeking support from Japan on its plan to construct a nuclear power plant.

Vietnam apparently is seeking to display itself as a favorable location for more Japanese corporate investment, as Japanese manufacturers are increasingly shifting production to other Asian countries.

India,Vietnam,Czechoslovakia and others must change tack now so the extinction can be delayed to it’s normal time! Seehttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/vanvadi/message/1259
Production,consumption and return must be the way of life in the changed lifestyle.
It’s time to close the gates to nukes….

“Production, consumption and return”, whereas in Australia we’d probably say “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. Don’t get me wrong, it is fun and creative to explore the diversity of expresions in English dialects across the world: diversity beats conformity!

The whole production consumption juggernaut is eating this planet to death, unfortunately.

@voltscommissar
I agree. But the addition of the action return changes the whole activity from the modern to the normal. One of the most interesting discussions on this process of change is to be found in the one time best selling book by Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America:Culture and Agriculture,Sierra Club Books and later Avon Books(1975). Think of the ipad or the laptop or the computer. Can it be safely returned to the bowels of the earth? Similarly nuclear wastes. Thus the change in life style means use of the brains to design and produce very differently. Whereas modern civilization with only production and consumption and waste leads to extinction,return makes for harmony with nature- imitating nature! Abandon nukes and see the change(coal may be considered as a form of nukes if the flyash is notreturned to the mines which have been shut down(assume perfect conservation and a normal way of life). Unedited Pl forgive.

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